media management

In my last post, I called attention to BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen's statement, "the most important piece of information ... was a chart that shows the marginal effective tax rate on investment province by province..."

What's interesting about corporate tax policy is that even the left wing is often supportive if they are informed and independent (the writers over at http://www.progressive-economics.ca/ are generally quite informed but most appear to be on a union payroll such that they have to frequently resort to an appeal to the "class struggle" to plug the gaps). For example, Ezra Klein allowed his blog to be used by a guest writer who observed that

The U.S. corporate income tax rate -- at 39 percent, it's the second highest in the developed world after Japan's, and Japan's may be about to drop -- is counterproductively high. It's probably the only tax in the U.S. these days that's conceivably on the wrong side of the Laffer curve; if we lowered the rate, we might take in more money.

But introducing the business-friendly HST to BC has been a public relations disaster for the BC government, which has led me to wonder what role the media played.

In Alberta during in the last few weeks complaints from the Wildrose party about how the Speaker of the provincial legislature (a member of the government caucus) was treating them appeared in the news. If the comment threads are any guide, a lot of people were (initially) of the opinion that Wildrose should just follow the rules. But a day or two later, after the media had talked to former Speakers and a political science teacher and reported their views, public opinion (amongst the segment aware of the reports) shifted to a clearly unfavourable view of the current Speaker's actions. The "trick", of course, was to be onside with informed opinion, such that when the media took up its obligation to inform by going out to collect informed opinions to relay, the desired result was achieved.

But what if the media doesn't do anything? Can a media outlet be biased through inaction?

I think the answer is clearly yes. But one of the ironies, if you will, is that the more even-handed and "responsible" the media is, the more likely it is to be ignored by the general public. “I’m not a journalist,” Glenn Beck (right) said in a June 2009 interview with GQ, “If I wanted to be a journalist, I would be Charlie Rose and bore the snot out of people and have fourteen people watching me." Beck knows what the customers of newsmedia want. His ratings almost doubled in 2009 alone. MSNBC, whose primetime lineup is the left wing answer to FOX, has also done relatively well such that last year CNN fell behind MSNBC with the 25-to-54-year old demographic in prime time. Fox News, for its part, overtook CNN in early 2002 and has long since left CNN in the ratings dust, since as of May 2010 the conservo-populist channel had three times the an average daily prime time audience of CNN. By August of this year, CNN's monthly primetime audience had slipped to a 10 year low, with 5 of its 10 lowest months for the previous ten years having come during 2010 despite just 8 months of the year having passed.

The reality is that media has learned that adding more ideological talk show hosts to prime time and shedding dissenting voices is the ticket to greater audience. "Fair and balanced" may sell as a marketing line, but not as a matter of substance.

"pouring gas on the fire"

Can a tweet be used as a Rorschach test?

Just saw da premier making a speech. Dat was quite a speech. Dem media better report it right.

Is the above
A) a light-hearted and lightly deliberated jab at Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach's notorious butchery of the King's English and his claims of media bias
B) an insult directed at Ukrainian Canadians
C) an insult directed at Edmontonians courtesy of "Calgary oil execs"
D) both B and C

According to Paula Simons of the Edmonton Journal, the correct answer is D.

Now perhaps no one should be surprised at Ms Simons' perspicacity here. After all, there are plenty of people who (at least claim to) see the malign agenda of corporate interests at work in the most banal of headlines. But surely when Simons subsequently fires an accusatory tweet off to (not even the original tweeter but) Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith for "pouring gas on the fire" of intra-provincial tribalism, even we Edmontonians realize that we have received one too many invitations to take umbrage at Premier Stelmach's political competition.

It was Ed's partisan people who invited the media to make an issue out of a remark by someone who had a small handful of Twitter followers and conclude that although the premier himself is the very picture of magnanimity, Ukrainians as a people would be remiss to let this "offensive Twitter post" just slide quietly into the forgettable and forgivable realm of the deleted and apologized for. In a display of their skill in media relations, the premier's office easily advanced simultaneously the contentions that there was an insult, that it mattered, and that is was directed at both the premier personally and at an ethnic group. These political pros, however, knew that they would have overplayed their hand to further suggest the Edmonton-injuring machinations of some Calgary cabal behind this tweet. Having actively campaigned as a politician myself last year, I am more than aware of how unconscious people can be of when their buttons are being pushed by the peddlers of identity politics, but Edmontonians might well be too worldly-wise to not ask themselves if Ms Simons shouldn't be directing her "pouring gas on the fire" finger wagging at the mirror.

For months now the Edmonton Journal's unsigned editorials have been beating the war drum about the impending threat to the tribe presented by "downtown Calgary" types who look down their noses at a premier who hails from the Journal's market. It would not surprise me to see these same unnamed editors in the future lament, with no sense of irony concerning what has been previously featured in their pages, that too few provincial politicians tweet or blog anything but the most guarded and spin-cycled material, never mind their staffers!

NOTE: I do not wish to suggest that the correct answer to the my opening hypothetical is simply "A". I agree with Danielle Smith that the tweet was "stupid." But there were elements of "A" here that seem to have gotten short shrift in the rush to judgmental judgment. If I had detected a belligerent streak in Stephen in my limited dealings with him to date, I would not take exception to the media picture of an uncurbed attack dog that has emerged of him. But I didn't. When someone is reasonably expected to be in the headlines routinely, an accurate picture can generally be expected to emerge as media stories written from a variety of perspectives accumulate. When someone is known for just one event or for a short period of time, however, distortions are more of danger. While I question the judgment of the party leadership re not approaching Stephen's past business associates to ask them if they thought "the accounting is just an absolute mess" before Stephen was a put on staff and, more precisely, before a Globe and Mail reporter asked, there is more to Stephen Carter than 140 characters. He has apologized, resigned, and on top of a week of negative publicity he is facing a financial crisis. Leaving aside his business dealings, which I am not in a position to come to a conclusion on, I hope that he finds honourable success in his future endeavors.

Nick Griffin, White House vs FOX, and the Overton window

If I am characterizing Joe Overton correctly, when someone comes along on a radical politician's political flank to promote even more radical ideas, it is plausible that the politician is encouraging this because it makes his or her ideas look less radical in comparison. It could be an effort to mainstream political deviance by repositioning the public's perception of deviance; i.e., "shift the window."

While I have a lot of time for ideas that place a lot of emphasis on how the range of "acceptable" opinion effectively limits political choices (I've argued that greater consciousness about the background "choice architecture" is more genuinely emancipatory than more formal choices - i.e. ballot casting - within the same constrained architecture), I'm skeptical of the thesis that the emergence of new radicals who are more extreme that the old typically helps the old radicals. Why? Because the dominating factor is polarization: if a political fight develops between the new radicals and their ideological opposites, ordinary people that are close to one side or the other will slide over that extra bit take up the fight for the "team", even though the prominent voice on the team is more extreme than their own.

Yesterday, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, who in June was elected to the European Parliament despite attracting less than 10% of the vote because of proportional representation, appeared on BBC's Question Time amidst an unsurprising uproar outside the studio. If one looks around the net for viewer reaction, the proportion of Britons exhibiting sympathy for Griffin is far in excess of 10%. The fact of the matter is that people like me, who are conservative but consider Griffin an extremist, find it difficult to not step into the debate to observe that, for example, with Peter Hain demanding that Griffin be barred from Question Time, you've got someone who today is as establishment as they come (Secretary of State for Wales) insisting that someone is being too radical to be heard when Hain made his own early career out of being radical (photo below is of Hain from 1969). Give me my own freedom of speech while denying it to someone else on the grounds that it isn't mainstream enough?

Could I point out that Hain was right in the thick of a campaign finance scandal this past year? Of course I could, but the reality is that I wouldn't be doing my reputation for judicious moderation (such as it is) any good by stepping in front of an attack on Griffin.

I believe this is what the Obama administration has in mind in its blasts at FOX News. It is difficult for many reasonable conservatives who find Glenn Beck etc over the top to resist the temptation to defend FOX with respect to the latest incident; indeed, Ken Rudin, who directs campaign coverage for NPR, described the White House's behaviour as "Nixonesque", a characterization he ended up apologizing for. If someone who's career depends upon preserving a neutral point of view couldn't resist the impulse to take a blast at FOX's attacker, how is anyone who is at all conservative supposed to refrain from similar comment? The situation is win-win for both the White House and FOX, since polarizing Americans will force those in the middle out into their respective camps. Everyone between them loses.

What is the latest incident? A month ago I wrote:

Obama has taken issue with FOX before, but this time the White House has further hinted that only "outlets" inclined to treat the administration uncritically will be granted access, meaning FOX would be a news gatherer who should not expect "participation any time soon."

That suggestion of mine that FOX will be frozen out in terms of participation has come true more thoroughly than I expected. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has observed: "the White House tried to exclude Fox News – alone among the five White House "pool" networks – from interviewing executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg on Thursday."

CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC (which all have reputations for being more or less centrist while NPR is considered left by conservatives and MSNBC is now considered left by almost everyone) all refused to play along with the administration's attempt to squeeze out FOX. The networks agreed that either FOX could interview as well or none of them would. The administration is now faced with the prospect of having to contend that CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC are biased against them or admit that forcing people to be "for us" or "against us" will backfire when the generally respected majority chooses the latter camp.

Wildrose Alliance appears in Edmonton Journal

The Wildrose Alliance made a rare appearance as the primary subject of an Edmonton Journal article this weekend about Edmonton. The party did so poorly in the Edmonton area in last year's provincial election that there is a good argument that significant coverage of the party has not been warranted in media covering the Edmonton market. That said, I believe that the media better serves society by adopting what marketing gurus call a "technology push" strategy as opposed to a reactive "demand pull" approach. Macroeconomic policy innovations are analogous to microeconomic innovations such that the media can and should play a constructive role in disseminating what comes out of policy shops. Political parties are (sadly) not policy shops on the same level as think tanks but they are an important vehicle for "commercializing" otherwise theoretical policy such that the media educates and informs by giving smaller non-populist parties attention that may be disproportionate to their popularity. It is the fact that most online-only media merely indulge populist prejudices instead of challenging them with new facts from investigative journalism or professional/academic research that makes me a defender of what bloggers dismiss as "the MSM".

The Edmonton Journal reflects its market more than I think it ideally should (and I don't just mean its editorial stance; - with respect to oil patch related stories like the Fraser Institute's Global Petroleum Survey, other media should have carried that as a wire story prepared by the Alberta capital's leading paper instead of the other way around). But for those of us who are concerned about developments like Newsweek's repositioning as an opinion journal (opinion always being a lower cost product that investigative journalism) it behooves us to pull some punches with respect to criticizing anything that makes money for traditional media (I could direct media moguls to the fact that the Economist is studiously avoiding populist compromises while making more money than ever, but we can't all emulate what John Ralston Saul dubbed "the Bible of the corporate executive").

But regardless of these considerations, the prospect of someone both urban and urbane (in striking contrast with our current premier) assuming the Wildrose Alliance leadership in conjuction with the buzz the party has been receiving in other Alberta media fully warrants Archie McLean's Sunday article.

My one objection to the story is describing the Wildrose Party as a "splinter group". The context suggests the Wildrosers split off from the Alberta Alliance. Although that is the case for some prominent and popular names like Eleanor Maroes, the Wildrose Party's President, Rob James, was a PC party stalwart, and Link Byfield, who was the most important player in the Wildrose Party (and who will continue as a respected elder in the merged party, not least for his critical role in advancing Danielle Smith's candidacy) had a negligible background in the Alberta Alliance as well, to my knowledge. For what it is worth, I was never a member of nor had anything to do with the Alberta Alliance.

Whither the Wildrose Alliance in Edmonton? If I learned anything from last year's election, it is that the party faces enormous obstacles in the capital region, principal among these being Stelmach's careful cultivation of the perception that he is the north's "native son". I believe job #1 at this point is to advocate for the cultivated Danielle Smith, who is marketable in a city that happens to be more cosmopolitan than many outsiders believe. Job #2 is to look at the October 2010 civic elections. The fact Mike Nickel could get elected as an alderman in Edmonton should be seen as evidence that while business-friendly candidates face an uphill battle in the capital city, it is possible to make a difference. Even an unsuccessful civic campaign would be a learning experience for those involved and would be serve as a valuable vetting process for the Wildrose Alliance in terms of candidates to recruit in the 2012 provincial election.

media matters

According to Barack Obama, "I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration."

The White House's grievances with the media do not end there, however. Last month, Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, attacked the UK Telegraph and then generalized his concern to all of Fleet Street, opining that re "the British media" in general "If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it would be the first stack of clips I picked up.... you're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other."

UPDATE June 20:

Meanwhile, Iran's supreme leader Khamenei declared Britain to be "the most evil" of foreign powers, reportedly because of the British media broadcasting BBC Persian into Iran.

In light of this concern, the White House may be relieved that many US newspapers are in financial trouble and, at least according to John Ibbitison's information, "network newscasts are also in terrible shape."

A decline in the influence of the MSM would be positive for political extremists. As Barney Frank (D-MA) has observed, "the right listens to talk radio, the left’s on the Internet and they just reinforce one another." Unabashedly partisan left wing news sites like DailyKos and the Huffington Post are already outstandingly popular: DailyKos averages 29 million pageviews per month and HuffPo 206 million. Almost 13 million people visit HuffPo monthly, making it the most popular online "newspaper" in the USA; this despite the fact conservative news aggregators were established earlier. The utterly crackpot infowars.com has 600 000 people visiting it each month. It is fair to say that the amount of material on infowars that would be published by the MSM is pretty much nil. The collapse of the MSM's gatekeeper role, however, means all the conspiracy theories will get more play. That's good news for the left, generally, since many people are prepared to believed that the planet is more or less governed by a grand corporate conspiracy.

Russian media at work

Check out Google's cache of an Interfax wire dated August 5. Then click on what it is a cache of. Gone! Evidently, news of militants entering what Russia officially considers Georgian territory on August 5 (traveling from North Ossetia to South Ossetia) needed to be scrubbed, perhaps because it didn't fit well with the narrative that the Georgians "started" the war on August 7.

See also this New York Times story on how the Russian media presented the FOX News clip.

"On [Russian] TV there is hardly any free reporting -- instead you see a lot of very aggressive propaganda." So says Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center. Der Spiegel adds that Gudkov believes it is "reminiscent of the worst of times in the Soviet era."

On an unrelated note, the cultural differences between Georgia and Iraq are telling. Tbilisi's authority in Poti (a port I spent a few days in last October) is surely negligible when the city is under Russian control and road and rail links to the Georgian capital have been severed. But instead of reports of Georgians looting each other, we get reports of demonstrations against Russia.

BBC bias part III

In another Reynolds piece,

... the West needs to acknowledge that the Russians did have a case. It needs to explain why it helped Kosovo but questioned Russia's right to help South Ossetia

It has been explained! See Deutsche Welle's interview with legal experts and note the "Not Another Kosovo" section. See also the New York Times on the question of "Is This Different Than Kosovo?" and this Slate piece: South Ossetia Isn't Kosovo. Reynolds' journalism is misleading because it implies that material like this does not exist. Responsible journalism would acknowledge the offered explanations and then bat them down in a piece that is clearly labeled opinion or editorial. Bonus question for Reynolds: when Russia "helped" South Ossetia did it help the more than 15 thousand Georgians living in South Ossetia who were robbed and expelled as a consequence of the Russian "help" or do they not count?

Since I've titled this "BBC bias" instead of "Paul Reynolds bias", let's consider a BBC piece without an author byline. The "timeline" pulls a Georgian action on August 7 out of the sequence of events to mark its beginning, the day "Georgian forces launch a surprise attack".

"Surprise"! From out of the clear blue sky of peace and harmony "perfidious" Georgian aggression bursts forth! Yet Russia's Interfax news agency reported that on August 5 "Volunteers are arriving in South Ossetia to offer help in the event of Georgian aggression". You've got forces moving across the internationally recognized Russia/Georgia border and that's just ignored?

According to the UK Times,

[t]he US State Department’s internal timeline of the crisis pinpoints the explosion on August 1 of two roadside bombs, believed to have been planted by South Ossetian separatists sympathetic to Russia, as a decisive moment. Five Georgian policemen were injured, one severely. ... It now appears that August 1 was a well-prepared “provocation”...

And according to the New York Times,

Pentagon and military officials say Russia held a major ground exercise in July just north of Georgia’s border, called Caucasus 2008, that played out a chain of events like the one carried out over recent days.
'This exercise was exactly what they executed in Georgia just a few weeks later,' said Dale Herspring, an expert on Russian military affairs at Kansas State University. 'This exercise was a complete dress rehearsal.'

Perhaps someone will write "surprise" on a piece of paper and pin it next to Reynold's "evidence" on a bulletin board in the BBC editorial room under the title of "We Called It!".

Meanwhile, the UK Times reports what went on behind Russian lines, as does the Guardian.

















UPDATE (August 24): A BBC Editor has apologized... for a "slip" whereby a "Russian invasion" was mentioned. There was no invasion. So very sorry. The Russian army ended up in Poti on the BBC's magic carpet ride, also known as a "humanitarian intervention". The there was no US-led "humanitarian intervention" in Iraq, however, the BBC can call an "invasion" when it sees one!

BBC bias part II

The examples of BBC partiality don't end there, although the further examples are not nearly as egregious as what I noted yesterday; that is, Reynold's description of Ossetian allegations as "evidence" (South Ossetia also claims that "Georgian fascists' atrocities ... outshone those of World War II Nazis"; - is that "evidence" as well, Mr Reynolds, that doesn't need a "difficult to verify" tag like Georgian claims?) and his painting of Moscow as the victim in "propaganda war" and/or "mud" slinging "media game" that Reynolds furthermore suggests is masterminded by "[t]he Bush administration". As Human Rights Watch noted, this was no "game" for victims here.

To consider another, less outrageous, example, then, take this Reynold's article:

It was not hard for Russia to justify its intervention. It simply stated that its citizens were not only at risk but under attack.

By that logic it would "not be hard for Russia to justify" an invasion of any and all of the Baltic States and Ukraine!

Justify to whom? To us? To the BBC? Titling the section "Do not allow a cuckoo to police the nest" is not a substitute for "justify TO ITSELF" if that's all Reynolds means to say. Failing to add "to itself" is the sort of editorial lapse I'm talking about here; minor, but real enough to take issue with - I'm not saying the BBC is no better than Russia Today.

More importantly, is there any "argument" "against that"? Is there an acknowledgment of the remarks of the current Chair of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, Sweden's Carl Bildt:

We did not accept military intervention by Milosevic's Serbia in other former Yugoslav states on the grounds of protecting Serbian passport holders. And we have reason to remember how Hitler used this very doctrine little more than half a century ago to undermine and attack substantial parts of central Europe

No. Instead, in the same piece, Reynolds writes of

the neo-conservatives ... who see Georgia (and Ukraine) as flag bearers for freedom which must be supported... Against that is the argument...

Reynolds doesn't miss the chance to inform readers of a counter-argument to "neo-con" appeals to "freedom" but treats Russia's self-interested casus belli uncritically. That isn't bias?

BBC bias on display: unverified vs "evidence"

While the BBC qualifies the claims of Georgian refugees as unverified ("but..."), the claims of Ossetian refugees are "evidence"! BBC correspondent Paul Reynolds also takes a select quote from Human Rights Watch to argue, in a non sequitur stretching from Tskhinvali to the White House, that "[t]he Bush administration appears to be ... playing down the Georgian attack [into the parts of its breakaway enclave that it does not already control] on 7 August". Never mind that Tom Parfitt of the Guardian quotes Human Rights Watch's Anna Neistat as saying

"The torching of houses in these [Georgian] villages is in some ways a result of the massive Russian propaganda machine which constantly repeats claims of genocide and exaggerates the casualties. That is then used to justify retribution."

The "machine" even managed to get "2000 dead" out on FOX, practically the citadel of conservative American mass media, from where it's gone viral on youtube and is raging through the blogosphere like Ossetians through Georgian villages. Yet Reynolds reports the "news" that Russia "los[t] the propaganda war"!

I suppose BBC's abandonment of its MSM gatekeeper role concerning the Ossetian/Russian allegations is a fitting parallel to the role the west has played concerning the gates to Georgia.

While Reynolds takes Georgia's relatively fledgling communications to task for daring to draw analogies with Prague in 1968 or Budapest in 1956 ("The comparisons did not fit the facts"), the International Herald Tribune ("the global edition of the New York Times") says that today "Russian armor ... travel[ed] nearly to the edge of the Georgian capital", a move that "opened a new security vacuum between Gori and [Igoeti], creating fresh targets" for "looters and armed gangs in uniform - many of them apparently Ossetians, Chechens and Cossacks - [who] have operated behind the army's path, ransacking villages..." and in another article titled "Georgians doing forced labor in South Ossetia" the paper quotes "a Russian officer" as believing that "Labor even turns monkeys into humans."

Reynolds also wags the finger at the "Western media" and unspecified nefarious forces for throwing "mud" at Moscow, and the BBC does not identify this piece as opinion or editorial?

I've e-mailed Mr Reynolds to ask him to comment on the rather different perspective of the editors at the Washington Post.

After reading this gripping overview in the Guardian, "A dirty little war", I don't think it is too much to say, shame on you, BBC, not just for being biased (to the anti-American left), but for abandoning the humanitarianism of left-leaning journalism like that of the Guardian. Guardian op-eds and editorials have "Comment" above their titles. This one has "News". The paper is accordingly puting the full weight of its credibility behind the claims of the fact this piece, claims of fact Reynolds should be challenging if he is not going to be writing a retraction.

the real issue with ABC News' debate moderators

What made non-partisans uncomfortable was not the fact Obama's questioners were not lobbing him soft balls over the plate that he could knock out of the park. The candidate will have enough opportunities to pitch to himself later.

What made them unconfortable is the idea that something like the connection between terrorist-turned-teacher Bill Ayers and Barack Obama is your typical blogosphere conspiracy theory that should have been checked, or at least thoroughly patted down, at the gate of the MSM.

The problem isn't that right wingers broke into the citadel of the mass market. It's that barbarian bloggers broke into the citadel. We should be making common cause to defend it regardless of our ideologies because otherwise our national conversation will deteriorate into a cacophany.

It's somewhat like letting an Internet-only blogger into the group of syndicated pundits. It's a decision that will be rightly scrutinized regardless of whether the blogger is right wing or left wing. All men were created equal but not all punditry. Paul Wells brought me a lot of traffic when he recently linked to me in the body of one of his posts. I like to think that's because he wasn't afraid to lift my post up to the level of posts by syndicated columnists. Note that not everyone with a reaction to Wells gets their reaction out there; - Wells doesn't have comments. Which is as it should be in my opinion because I don't think it serves us to see someone like Wells goaded into leaving the citadel to engage rude Vandals in the swamps. Why? Because MOST people aren't watching out there and understandably so.

Both left wingers and right wingers will approve of the idea of sending a someone on the team they are supporting down to the minors when it's understood that you can't have too many men on the ice. People want to see the big league action and that means not everyone can play.

We are all entitled to a soapbox but some voices deserve bigger soapboxes than others. Elitist? Yes. But the secret to democracy is protecting it from the daily mob. I'm not calling for a hereditary aristocracy here but a meritocracy. Old pundits whose eloquence or perspicacity has been eclipsed by some new wit on the scene need to be shuffled off the stage. To a large extent this happens naturally on the exeunt side as the audience chooses to move on. But the entrance side generally involves a conscious decision by the proprietor of the platform (i.e. the MSM) and it is healthy to have those decisions second guessed.